The Century of Kurdish Language Bans: A Tongue's Fight to Live

At a Glance

Article 39 of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, the settlement that fixed the borders of the modern Turkish republic, guaranteed every citizen the use of any language in trade, the press, and public meetings. The article was not applied.
Article 14 of the Eastern Reform Plan of September 1925, a secret government program, set penalties for anyone using a language other than Turkish in state offices, schools, and markets across a listed set of provinces.
The "Citizen, Speak Turkish" campaigns began in 1928 and flared again in 1933. Oral history recalls fines charged by the word for Kurdish spoken in the market.
Kurdish village names were changed across decades. The count David McDowall reports is plain: by 1986, in six provinces, 2,842 of 3,524 villages had had their names changed.
Law 2932 of 19 October 1983 banned Kurdish without naming it. The law was repealed on 12 April 1991.
In the ban years the language lived at home, in the lullaby, in the dengbêj's voice, and in smuggled cassettes. Radio Yerevan built a bridge of sound from across the border.
The European Union harmonization package of August 2002 opened a door to broadcasting and private courses "in different languages and dialects."
Turkey's state broadcaster launched a Kurdish channel on 1 January 2009; it took the name TRT Kurdî in 2015. In the same years, Kurdish-language departments opened at universities.
Syria stripped tens of thousands of Kurds of citizenship in a one-day census in 1962; Kurdish broadcasting stayed banned there for decades too.
In Turkey today Kurdish is taught as an elective subject, not as the language of instruction. This is not an opinion; it is the state of the law.

The year is the early 1940s, the place the market of Diyarbakır, a mainly Kurdish city in Turkey's southeast. Mele Abdullah, a village religious teacher, has come down to town to shop. He speaks no Turkish; he makes his case in Kurdish. A municipal officer takes him by the arm and brings him before the mayor. The mayor's ruling is short: he spoke Kurdish in the market, and he will pay five kuruş, a handful of pennies, for every word.

Mele Abdullah lays all the money in his pocket on the table. Then he adds: I do not know Turkish, and I will speak Kurdish in the market until evening; let your officer come with me, and in the evening you will settle the bill and give me my change.

This scene is not a court record but an entry in oral history. The historian Ayşe Hür passes it on from a 1999 journal. Folk memory tells it this way, and the documents confirm the frame: in those years, speaking Kurdish in public was truly subject to penalty. This article follows that language through its century, tracing it not by events but by decrees and laws.

What Did Lausanne Say, and What Did Ankara Do?

The starting point is an international treaty. Article 39 of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne is clear: every citizen of Turkey may use any language they wish in trade, in religion, in the press, in publications, and in public meetings. The article also grants the ease of using one's own language in court. On paper a Kurd could publish a Kurdish newspaper and campaign in Kurdish.

The practice went the other way. In 1924 education was unified and the medreses, the traditional religious schools, were closed. The rooms where Kurdish had been taught for centuries fell officially silent. So what was the turning point?

The answer lies in 1925. Right after the suppression of the uprising led by Shaikh Said, the government approved a secret program called the Eastern Reform Plan. Article 14 of the plan lists a set of provinces and districts running from Malatya to Van. In these places, anyone using a language other than Turkish in government offices, schools, and markets would be punished for "opposing government orders." Ayşe Hür quotes this article from the document. The legal ground of Mele Abdullah's five-kuruş fine is exactly those lines.

The plan did not target only the language; it also carried orders of exile and resettlement. But the subject here is language policy, and on that front the plan worked as if it stayed in force for half a century.

Citizen, Speak Turkish: The Market and Street Years

The "Citizen, Speak Turkish" campaign, launched by university students in 1928, targeted the languages of the public square. The campaign flared again in 1933. Placards went up; newspapers ran pieces of support. At first the languages of non-Muslim minorities were in the sights; in the eastern provinces the weight fell on Kurdish.

What did this mean in daily life? There is a scene the Diyarbakır writer Şeyhmus Diken passes on. A man who knows no Turkish goes to the bakery to ask for bread. He finds his way out in one sentence: "Ka nanekî bi Tirkî bide." That is, give me a loaf of bread in Turkish. The baker understands the situation and holds out the loaf: here is your loaf in Turkish.

The state's dictionary was changing too. A detail McDowall records: from 1938, official speech began to call the Kurds "Mountain Turks." The logic of the language ban can be read from there. Kurdish was not being banned, because by official acceptance no such language existed. The 1934 Settlement Law also sorted the population into zones by whether they were of "Turkish culture"; the aim was cultural melting.

After the 1960 coup the campaign returned. The journalist Ahmet Kahraman writes that the Turkification of village names sped up and the "citizen, speak Turkish" air returned. Kahraman also passes on what the coup leader Cemal Gürsel told a crowd on an eastern tour: spit in the face of anyone who calls you a Kurd, you are all Turks.

Erasing It From the Map and the Birth Certificate

The language was not banned only while spoken. It was erased from place names and from children's names. How far did the erasing reach?

The changing of village names was an administrative program spread across decades. McDowall gives a concrete count: by 1986, in Adıyaman, Gaziantep, Urfa, Mardin, Siirt, and Diyarbakır, 2,842 of 3,524 villages had had their names changed. For Turkey as a whole, research puts the number of changed village names around twelve thousand. The exact total shifts from source to source; the scale does not.

And what of the people? The population law forbade the registering of names "contrary to the national culture." McDowall records the families who could not give a child a Kurdish name under this clause, and the children whose names were changed by court order. That a family cannot give its child a name in its own language is the point where the ban reaches into the most private ground.

In villages whose names were changed, the people kept using the old one. The official map and the people's map lived apart for a century. Today many villages are known by both names.

Why Did a Poem Become a Matter of State?

For the press's trial with the bans, one event is enough. On 31 August 1959, in the Diyarbakır newspaper İleri Yurt, Musa Anter published a Kurdish poem titled "Qimil." The poem told of a harvest struck by the qimil beetle and the song of a peasant girl. The subject was an agricultural pest; what was counted a crime was the language itself.

The Ankara press rose up. National newspapers asked "who gives this paper its newsprint?" A case was opened against Anter; then came the famous Trial of the 49, in which 49 Kurdish intellectuals were arrested. Anter spent his life in courtrooms. In 1992 he was killed in an armed attack in Diyarbakır; the trail of the killers reaches into the dark apparatus inside the state.

Another document of the same period is the closing of a party. In 1971 the Constitutional Court closed the Workers' Party of Turkey; among the reasons was a sentence in a congress resolution on the existence of the Kurdish people. The sociologist İsmail Beşikçi was expelled from his university for writing that Kurds exist, and spent years in prison. The language ban had widened into a ban on the word: Kurdish was forbidden, and saying "Kurd" was risky too.

Law 2932: The Statute of the Language It Would Not Name

The coup of 12 September 1980 opened the harshest period against the language. The 1982 constitution, written at the coup-makers' direction, put the notion of a "language banned by law" into the constitutional text. In December 1982 the Ministry of Education sent the provincial governors a circular: folk songs of the east and southeast were to be sung only in Turkish. McDowall documents this.

The main law came in 1983. Law 2932 of 19 October 1983, "On Publications Made in Languages Other Than Turkish," declared: the mother tongue of Turkish citizens is Turkish. Every kind of activity aimed at using or spreading another language as a mother tongue is forbidden. Carrying a placard in another language at a meeting, or issuing records, cassettes, or video without permission, fell within the ban too.

The strangeness of the law leaps out at once: the word "Kurdish" does not appear in the text. The ban targets languages other than "the first official languages of states that recognize Turkey." Why first official languages? The detail McDowall points to is this: Kurdish was at that date the second official language in Iraq. The formula was built to leave Kurdish out without naming it. A law that banned a language would not even write the language's name.

In this period the control of cassettes and broadcasts was part of daily life. Kurdish cassettes were seized; songs sung at weddings could bring an investigation. In prisons, the ban on speaking Kurdish was applied on visiting days, so mothers who knew no Turkish could not speak with their children. The human rights reports of the period record this.

The law lived eight years. At the initiative of Turgut Özal, the assembly repealed 2932 on 12 April 1991. The Anti-Terror Law passed the same day narrowed expression by another road. In December 1991 the first legal Kurdish newspaper began publishing; seizures and cases did not let go of it. The ban had lifted; the pressure had changed its form.

Across the Border: A One-Day Census in Syria

The banned century of Kurdish is not confined to Turkey. What did the same policy look like across the border? On 23 August 1962 the Damascus government issued Decree 93 and ordered an extraordinary census in the province of Hesekê. The census was completed on 5 October, in a single day. Everyone who was not an Arab, in practice only the Kurds, had to prove with documents that they had lived in Syria before 1945. Around 120,000 Kurds who could not prove it were stripped of citizenship; the status passed to their children and grew past 200,000 within generations. McDowall also lists the later bans: a ban on Kurdish broadcasting from 1958, a ban on Kurdish in the workplace in 1986, a ban on non-Arabic songs at weddings in 1988. Books were printed in Beirut and slipped in secretly; Kurdish lessons were given in homes.

For comparison: in Iraq, Kurdish became the language of official business in some regions under the Local Languages Law of 1931; the 1970 autonomy accord widened Kurdish education, and today Kurdish is the language of instruction in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Iran never banned Kurdish on the Turkish scale; broadcasting was possible at intervals, but there too no Kurdish-language state schooling was built.

The Years of Easing: Screen, Course, Lectern

The 2000s opened a different page. The 2001 constitutional amendment took the "banned language" phrases out of the text. The European Union harmonization package, adopted in August 2002 as Turkey pursued EU membership, allowed radio and television broadcasting "in the different languages and dialects traditionally used by Turkish citizens in their daily lives"; by the same formula private language courses could open. The careful reader sees the pattern: the ban of 1983 and the permission of 2002 were both written without naming Kurdish.

The practice ran haltingly. In 2004 the state broadcaster tried a few hours of Kurdish a week; most of the private Kurdish courses opened in those years closed within a few years. The real threshold was 1 January 2009: the state broadcaster's full-day Kurdish channel went on air. The channel took the name TRT Kurdî in 2015. A state channel had begun broadcasting in a language banned by law a quarter of a century earlier.

The university door opened a crack too. In 2009 the Living Languages Institute was founded at Mardin Artuklu University; in the 2011-2012 school year, for the first time in Turkey, undergraduates were admitted to Kurdish Language and Literature. In 2012 an elective Kurdish course entered the middle schools. So what is still missing?

What is missing is the language of instruction. In Turkey today Kurdish can be taught as an elective subject; there is no state school where the lessons are given in Kurdish, no mother-tongue education. This sentence is not a polemic; it is a photograph of the law. Set Article 39 of Lausanne beside today's picture, and the century's reckoning is left to the reader.

How Did the Language Come Through This Century Alive?

You can ban a language by law. So how is it that the language does not die?

The first half of the answer is at home. In the periods when Kurdish was wiped from the public square, it lived in the kitchen, in the lullaby, in the fairy tale. The language passed from generation to generation most of all in the voices of women. The ban could rule the school and the square; it could not rule the hearth.

The second half is in sound. The dengbêj, the master bards of the word, carried memory by heart where writing was banned. The Kurdish broadcasts of Radio Yerevan, from across the Soviet border, did the same work. Over 1,500 shellac records and tape recordings piled up in the radio's archive; by 1993, 1,730 songs had been set down. In the years Kurdish was banned in Turkey, village houses locked onto that frequency at night. Illegally copied cassettes were part of the same network; by 1991 Kurdish music cassettes were openly on sale. We told both stories separately on this site: the dengbêj tradition and Radio Yerevan.

The third half is in exile. The first Kurdish newspaper appeared in Cairo in 1898; at the century's end Sweden took up the same work. In 1996 a Swedish newspaper wrote that 500 Kurdish books had by then been printed there. The banned language grew, in the print shops of other countries, into a language of literature, a story we tell in a separate article.

The account, in short: the ban lasted a hundred years, the language outlasted it. The texts of the laws sit in archives. The language is still spoken.

Frequently Asked Questions

Under which law was Kurdish banned in Turkey? The clearest measure was Law 2932 of 19 October 1983. It banned the use of languages other than Turkish as a mother tongue and banned publishing in those languages; the text does not mention Kurdish by name. Earlier, the 1925 Eastern Reform Plan and various administrative orders had done the same work.

When and how was Law 2932 repealed? It fell on 12 April 1991, through a clause in the Anti-Terror Law. That same law went on limiting expression by other articles; Kurdish publications still faced seizures and cases through the 1990s.

What was the "Citizen, Speak Turkish" campaign? A public-pressure campaign begun in 1928 with student associations and flared again in 1933. Speaking any language but Turkish in public was pressed on people. In the eastern provinces this reached as far as fines for speaking Kurdish.

When did the state Kurdish TV channel open? On 1 January 2009 it began broadcasting as TRT 6; on 10 January 2015 its name became TRT Kurdî. The channel broadcasts in Kurmancî and Zazakî. For the branches of Kurdish, see our article on whether Kurdish is a language or a dialect.

Is there Kurdish-language education in Turkey today? There is an elective subject, not a language of instruction. Since 2012, an elective Kurdish course can be opened in middle schools; some universities run Kurdish departments and institutes. But there is no state school system in which the lessons themselves are given in Kurdish.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary sources (from the Bedel Boseli Collection):

David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds; the text and translation of Law 2932, the December 1982 folk-song circular, the village-name count, and the 1962 Syrian census come from here.
Ayşe Hür, Kürtlerin Öteki Tarihi (2017) and her archive of newspaper columns; in particular "Lozan, Şark Islahat Planı ve Kürtçe" (21 October 2012).
Ahmet Kahraman, Kürt İsyanları (Evrensel Basım Yayın); used with cross-checking, for the post-1960 campaigns and Cemal Gürsel's words.
The academic thesis on Kurdish radio broadcasting in the Middle East; the Radio Yerevan archive figures come from here.
The Kurdish Library (Stockholm) web archive: the full texts of the 2002 European Union harmonization laws.

Social Media Summaries

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Early 1940s, the Diyarbakır market: a fine of five kuruş per word for speaking Kurdish. The man lays his money down and says he will speak until evening, settle the bill then. A language's banned century: bedelboseli.com/en/century-of-kurdish-language-bans
Law 2932 of 1983 banned Kurdish, yet the word "Kurdish" never appears in the text. The legal history of banning a language without naming it: bedelboseli.com/en/century-of-kurdish-language-bans
McDowall's count: by 1986, in six provinces, 2,842 of 3,524 villages were renamed. The official map and the people's map lived a century apart: bedelboseli.com/en/century-of-kurdish-language-bans
In 1959 a Kurdish poem was published; its subject was a wheat beetle. The paper was shut, cases opened, 49 intellectuals arrested. The year a poem became a matter of state: bedelboseli.com/en/century-of-kurdish-language-bans
The ban came by law in 1983 and left by law in 1991. The language outlasted the century at home, in the lullaby, in the dengbêj's voice, and in smuggled cassettes: bedelboseli.com/en/century-of-kurdish-language-bans